1. Field of the Invention
This invention relates to the collation and preparation of flexible (paper) sheets for use on mail preparing machines known as inserters and constitutes an improvement over that disclosed in U.S. Pat. No. 5,033,727.
2. Description of Related Art
Known inserter machines have insert storing hoppers positioned along a common conveyor. The inserts within each hopper are dispensed one at a time to the common conveyor for presentation to the insert station.
The inserts within each insert storing hopper are separated from the supply stack of inserts therein by a vacuum cup and a separator foot. Since the vacuum foot pulls downward on the bottom of the lowest sheet of material in the supply stack, the bottom sheet must be singular or, if plural, must be bound with a folded edge, stapled, glued or some other means to the sheet or sheets of material thereabove. This is necessary if the multiple sheets are to be dispensed to the conveyor as a set.
Another common means to dispense multiple pages from a supply stack is by means of aligned punched holes in a number of lower pages. A vacuum cup is positioned over the aligned holes and vacuum penetrates the holes to the first unperforated sheet. As the vacuum cup pulls downward, the perforated sheets and the unperforated sheet thereabove are pulled downward and separated from the stack.
This latter method of sheet preparation presents one obvious problem. Holes must be placed in sheets which have printing thereon, thus restricting the positioning of the printing.
The objective for the instant invention is to provide a means of taking paper which has been cut from a continuous web by a paper cutting machine and presenting the paper on an electronically controlled intermittently driven conveyor. The conveyor electronically counts incoming sheets of paper and indexes when a preset number of sheets has been cut. The conveyor has the ability to collate sheets of one length or sheets of multiple lengths. Once collated, the sheets of material may be transferred by the conveyor to an addition modular supply hopper which dispenses a cover sheet to the conveyor path. The collated sheets are transferred to a modular device which binds the sheets together with a staple or staples along a common edge. The bound collated sheets are then placed on a conveyor and manually gathered into stacks where the conveyor can be an in-line modular piece of the production line consisting of a paper cutter or other equipment such as a paper folding machine or bound edge padding machine.